of your body as in a cup filled with listening (pregnable),
and the tremble rides my whiskied vowel, what your body is
runs down my thickness ruinously and sweetly.
[A MONTH OF SUNDAYS]
Including the low hollow of sighing (singing) figures
figuring (hollering) moving forward while moving backward
for a god who demands a constant and singular praise,
all the head holds, and all the lyrics of rejoicing.
[LAMENTO]
When my wind-scuffed wig mingles in halfhearted tufts
with the dust (the shock of growing old without growing);
when the shine is greased in the aesthetics of whatever
grief calls itself (grief), I know the sublime is approaching.
[A HISTORY OF SELF-RELIANCE]
The façade of solitude: a serious black man
reading a book at happy hour in a bar. The façade
of newness: pier stilts along the Mississippi painted
so white, you have to touch them to know their age.
[WESTERN WIND]
Since it is true that waiting on the dead requires living,
true that death means in its way, we are alive or will grasp,
when the future arrives, what it means to be dead,
call me to your arms, and I will come fiercely sweetly.
[EVENING ALARM]
We tumble across the mattress unfazed. You treat me
like a fix. We set to licking. We nix the ticktock. Your socks
rolled down to your toes, I love your nose. We steal fire
and walk until the path levitates. Our feet light up the place.
[VIOLETS FOR YOUR VIOLETS]
When what your body is flowers in its garment of scent,
when your hot polka-dot dime-store dress fills
with duskiness like the idea of a net (cape), I want to drag
my bone across your path (and here I’m telling you the truth).
[THE SHAPE OF THE HEAD]
When I said my past was a severed tail, I had my eyes
closed, so the lie wouldn’t sting. When I had my head
between your knees, I was looking for where it was
I’d come from, and how it was I could escape.
NOTHING
which is what the first idiot says
to the second idiot in the joke
I have made up but will not share
with you when the scent of another
of those full-boned marital truths
hovers in the air between us.
I feel the joke knock around and expand
in my gut, pushing all the good air out.
I’d rather be a blind girl, Etta James sings
somewhere, and no one is willing
to eat or dance because almost everyone is
sleeping: my single-breasted mother
in her soft blue shirt, my stepfather
in his soft shoe blues a floor below her.
I love the way a good song makes you
say nothing. And I believe happiness
is not the same thing as success.
I feel the joke walk in ahead of us
when we enter your parents’ house,
where the big bed fills the bedroom
and the big TV fills the den
and the Sundays are filled with Amen.
Sometimes when we are sitting
with our heads bowed over dinner
I can hear nothing: not God
saying you are blessed,
not the meat cooling, not your parents’
nor our own breathing. I love the way love
makes us say nothing like a good song,
but I believe it could be fear. Some nights
I lie on my belly in the darkness of our room,
my cheek to the pillow, my head to the wall,
you waiting, and me saying it to you.
GOD IS AN AMERICAN
I still love words. When we make love in the morning,
your skin damp from a shower, the day calms.
Schadenfreude may be the best way to name the covering
of adulthood, the powdered sugar on a black shirt. I am
alone now on the top floor pulled by obsession, the ink
on my fingers. Sometimes what I feel has a difficult name.
Sometimes it is like the world before America, the kinship
of God’s fools and guardians, of hooligans; the dreams
of mothers with no children. A word can be the boot print
in a square of fresh cement and the glaze of morning.
Your response to my kiss is, I have a cavity. I am in
love with incompletion. I am clinging to your moorings.
Yes, I have a pretty good idea what beauty is. It survives
all right. It aches like an open book. It makes it difficult to live.
[COFFIN FOR HEAD OF STATE]
LIGHTHEAD’S GUIDE TO ADDICTION
And if you are addicted to sleep, a bay of fresh coffee may help.
If you are addicted to coffee, teach yourself to breakdance.
If you are addicted to dancing, polio will cure you.
If you hear that the last black man alive will be burned at sunset,
find an underground railroad.
If you are addicted to railroads, try wearing undersized shoes.
No one knows where your mother has gone with her tax refund.
If you are addicted to shoes, move to a provincial village in Japan.
If you are addicted to Japan, try eating with no teeth.
If you are addicted to teeth, visit the wife beater’s widow;
she will be upstairs awaiting your caress.
I often wake up horny. If you are addicted to masturbation, seek company.
If you are addicted to company, try starlight and silence.
If you are addicted to silence, find guard dogs, traffic, or infants.
If you are addicted to infants, try reliable contraception.
Or try asking yourself: What’s wrong with me?
If you are addicted to contraception, try recklessness.
Try riding an unsaddled horse until you are thrown into a bed of gravel.
If you are addicted to recklessness, try a spoon-fed disease.
My mother loves imagining the day she’ll die.
If you are addicted to disease, visit an Old World doctor.
If you are addicted to doctors, try war.
If you are addicted to sorrow, all my talk about loss is not loss to you.
No one knows why your father built a shed for his weapons.
Probably was some hellified form of addiction.
If you are addicted to weapons, please find the people who plan to burn
the last black man alive at sunset for me.
Or try learning a little history.
Obviously, I’m addicted to repetition. Which is a form for history.
If you are addicted to history, try a blindfold of razors or buy a Cadillac.
If you are addicted to Cadillacs, try poverty.
No one is addicted to poverty, but if you are, try wealth.
If you are addicted to wealth, you’ll need money.
If you are addicted to money, you’ll need money. Try that.
LINER NOTES FOR AN IMAGINARY PLAYLIST
for R
1. “Wind Solo” by The Felonious MonksFrom the album Silense © 1956
1945, after everyone got hip to the blues, this is the code
The hipsters devised. This is what they call a mean
Horn. High on something, the sax man wades beyond the shallow
End of a stormy sea. You can almost see him gathering mist.
The album cover’s got nothing but the contours of his body
And a dangerous language you comprehend even if you can’t read.
2. “The DJ’s PJs” by SGP (the Stank Gangsta Prankst
as)From the album Loot the Joker © 1992
This is for shell-toe sneakers and warm-ups dyed the hottest red
I ever saw. So red it was cool. So cool it was a permanent cold.
You can almost hear Negroes freed of the ghetto, the mint
Spewing greenbacks in this song. Who wouldn’t want to shampoo
In Benjamins? Even one hit and a dope video makes a mystic
Of the pauper. When it’s over, you can hear someone tipping a bottle.
3. “Mood Etude #5” by Fred Washington Sr.From the album Blassics © 1985
Strange inclusion, I know, but sometimes lyrics wear a blindfold.
How many violins, harps, and grand pianos constitute a jazz reed?
This is Bach according to a young man born on the Carolina coast.
This is Bach according to a man whose favorite word is Amen.
This is Bach according to a man whose childhood was a shambles.
What if Keats heard jazz? What if Bach heard the blues? It’s all music.
4. “Metal Face” by Glad Battle WoundsFrom the album New Battle © 2004
Remember the Mute Trout album Empty (MT)? The mystique
Of this jam won’t puzzle you if you do. The way the battle
For hearts and minds sounds like the same old bullshit. A newsreel
Of tanks crushing corpses and a brave soldier in a coat
Of medals. Remember those old war songs about the Age of Man?
Maybe like those cuts this one is about being bold and shackled.
5. “Oh, You” by Marvin & the Gay GhostsFrom the album Baby, Don’t Won’t © 1987
Everything that needs to be said here is contained in a shadow.
Whenever I fell asleep listening to this song, I woke drenched in music,
The CD on repeat, my mouth filled with the meat of the bitter-Sweet
I’d dream of my first love, then find none of it was real.
Some songs are like that, I suppose. Like being clothed
In sweat and wistfulness. Sigh. It’s a tune to make you moan.
6. “Mythic Blues” by Big Bruise GuitarFrom the album The Devil’s Angel © 1924
If you’re happy, skip this one. It’s definitely not meant
To make you dance. Yes, the previous track was also slow. Use the shuffle
Mode if you don’t want to walk the path I’ve left you. Called “Mythic
Blues,” this track has a way of reminding you how sin does battle
With the good in you. Saltwater is all a listener can reap.
You can see nothing but the blues even when your eyes are closed.
Friend, sometimes the wind’s scuttle makes the reeds
In the body vibrate. Sometimes the noise gives up its code
And the music is better at saying what I mean to say.
SATCHMO RETURNS TO NEW ORLEANS
You are the greasy Daddy of Jazz, Peasy Daddy.
You are the brassy Mother of Jazz, the bellowing bastard of jazz,
Sweet-trumpeting strumpet of jazz, Easy Daddy;
A hankie full of toots and zooting, Mister Sadmo;
And I shall never blame America for not loving and then loving you;
Nor shall I blame the Mississippi, nor the dens of Chicago,
Nor your eight-mile storyville grin, nor your Zulu blackface,
Mister Black Face. I shall not blame the “Cake Walk Blues”
Nor the “Saint Louis Blues,” St. Louis. I shall not blame
The “Moonlight Blues,” nor the “Starlight Blues,” nor the “Midnight Blues,”
Nor “Mack the Knife,” nor the switchblade in your pocket,
Nor the pale moon shining on the fields below,
Mr. Press-Me-to-Your-Heart Sweet-Louisiana: I’ve got no reason
To be blue. Nor shall I blame the heebie-jeebies
Of the West Coast Negro, nor shall I blame the wide eye
Of the banjo, nor shall I blame the band’s spit-shined
“When the Saints Go Marching In,” played as if it wasn’t at first
A funeral song, and finished somewhere near closing time
With “La Vie en Rose,” your heart so broken again
You doze on the cab ride home and dream the notes
To “West End Blues,” which is what an American city sounds like
At 45 mph after dark when your eyes are closed.
FISH HEAD FOR KATRINA
The mouth is where the dead
Who are not dead do not dream
A house of damaged translations
Task married to distraction
As in a bucket left in a storm
A choir singing in the rain like fish
Acquiring air under water
Prayer and sin the body
Performs to know it is alive
Lit from the inside by reckoning
As in a city
Which is no longer a city
The tongue reaching down a tunnel
And the teeth wet as windows
Set along a highway
Where the dead live in the noise
Of their shotgun houses
They drift from their wards
Like fish spreading thin as a song
Diminished by its own opening
Split by faith and soaked in it
The mouth is a flooded machine
SNOW FOR WALLACE STEVENS
No one living a snowed-in life
can sleep without a blindfold.
Light is the lion that comes down to drink.
I know tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk
holds nearly the same sound as a bottle.
Drink and drank and drunk-a-drunk-drunk,
light is the lion that comes down.
This song is for the wise man who avenges
by building his city in snow.
For his decorations in a nigger cemetery.
How, with pipes of winter
lining his cognition, does someone learn
to bring a sentence to its knees?
Who is not more than his limitations?
Who is not the blood in a wine barrel
and the wine as well? I too, having lost faith
in language, have placed my faith in language.
Thus, I have a capacity for love without
forgiveness. This song is for my foe,
the clean-shaven, gray-suited, gray patron
of Hartford, the emperor of whiteness
blue as a body made of snow.
TANKHEAD
As General Patton you will be expected to give
his D-day speech to park audiences twice a day.
To fit in the costume you will have to eat nothing
but haggis, a Scottish dish consisting of the minced heart,
lungs, and liver of a sheep.
It may be that visitors love our General Patton best
because of the huge, mightily polished helmet bobbing on a head
twice the size of the body. Notice the cut of his riding pants,
the angle of his cavalry boots. Boys love the nickle-plated Colt
and the .357 Magnum our Old Blood and Guts pretends to fire.
Fathers love the shimmer of his two dozen medals.
The general’s swagger will become second nature to you.
Carrying such an enormous head, your body will seem
drunk on patriotism. Which is appropriate, since Patton walked funny.
He walked like a man who dislikes humor aimed at himself.
He was very self-conscious and believed his high-pitched voice
made soldiers think of their grandmothers.
Patton was not a singer because of his teeth.
“We can no more understand a Russian than a Chinese
or a Japanese, and from what I have seen of them,
I have no particular desire to understand them
except to ascertain how much lead or iron it takes to kill them,”
Patton liked to say. People of all creeds are welcomed here,
of course. You would be shocked to know
that our best Patton performer ever was a thin Asian girl.
Herodotus, who loved tales of battle, foresaw Patton’s death
in a dream: the 2½-ton truck mashing his Cadillac outside Mannheim
in 1945, the clouds’ warble, Old Blood and Guts
paralyzed from the neck down and covered in rain.
I have seen his big head left like a broken sarcophagus
outside the break room by spineless performers.
Herodotus noted that early sarcophagi
were carved from a special kind of rock
that consumed the flesh of the corpse inside.
This should give you a sense of what it will mean
to spend your days in the head of Patton.
His favorite animal was the armadillo.
He called Robert E. Lee Jesus. He fell in love
with Dwight Eisenhower between 1935 and 1940.
Distrustful of civilians, Patton measured everything
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